Still dominant after 15 years, Coupons.com announces new CMO and VP Production Operations

For the second year running, O.G. couponing giant Coupons.com was recently named one of Bay Area News Group’s “Top Workplace in the Bay Area.” While trophies and banners are nice in general, this distinction is a bit more meaningful than some given that it’s based entirely on surveys of current employees. Coupons has already begun putting this recognition to good effect in attracting fresh talent to its senior leadership team. This week, the company announced the addition of Matthew Wisk as its Chief Marketing Officer and Stephen Simpson as Vice President of Production Operations.

Coupons.com CEO Steven Boal described Wisk and Simpson as having “highly relevant experience and deep expertise in consumer marketing and site engineering.”

Wisk will oversee Coupons’ consumer marketing functions, including online and broadcast advertising, sponsorships, social media, affiliate, SEO, SEM, email, and publisher partnerships, according to the company. Most recently, he was President of MyPoints.com at United Online and before that VP and Chief Marketing Officer of United Online’s Classmates.com, NetZero, and Juno. Wisk, who has also held senior executive positions at TiVo, Herbalife, and Nokia, was named Brandweek’s “Grand Marketer of the Year” in 2000.

Simpson is no slouch either, with three decades of engineering experience under his belt, most recently at Groupon where he was the SRE Architect for Global Platform Engineering. Previously, he held senior SRE (site reliability engineer) positions with ASC and EA, and was a Senior Director at Yahoo. Simpson will oversee Coupons’ global data centers, disaster recovery, enterprise systems SOX and PCI compliance, security, platform hardware infrastructure life cycle, and capacity planning, according to the company.

Digital couponing is a highly attractive and thus competitive space, but 15-year-old Coupons.com is still the 800 pound gorilla in the category and is the 40th largest website in the US according to Nielsen. The company works with many of the world’s largest consumer brands and retailers including Clorox, General Mills, Johnson & Johnson, Kellogg’s, Kimberly-Clark, Kraft Foods, A&P, CVS, Duane Reade, H-E-B, Kmart, Kroger, Safeway and Walgreens.

Recently, the company has begun to extending beyond the Web and onto mobile, through the launch of Grocery iQ, Coupons.com, and KitchMe.com mobile apps. Coupons.com will face increasing competition in this new channel, including from the likes of SnipSnap, ZenDeals, Shopkick, and retailer specific apps like those from Target, Wal-Mart, Walgreens, and others. As this fight intensifies, it will not be enough for the company to rely on its scale alone, it will have to provide new, and more innovative user experiences as well.

The most recent revenue figures shared by Coupons.com were in 2011 when it generated $90 million, on the back of which the company raised its most recent $200 million financing round at a valuation of $1 billion. That’s big mature company territory, explaining why the company now attracts career executives rather than (or perhaps in addition to) young, up-and-coming talent. Few Internet companies are able to maintain a market lead as long as coupons has, and fewer pre-dot-com-crash are still relevant today. For those looking on from the outside, success by Wisk and Simpson’s will look like more of the same.